There are very few artists in human history whose life story feels at once too big and too fragile for the movie screen. Michael Jackson is one of them. So when Antoine Fuqua’s biopic ‘Michael’ finally arrived in theatres in May 2026, the question on everyone’s mind wasn’t just whether it was a good film. It was whether any film could ever be enough.
The short answer? It’s complicated. The longer answer is what this is about.
What ‘Michael’ Gets Spectacularly Right
Let’s start where the film deserves its flowers: Jaafar Jackson’s performance. Michael Jackson’s own nephew steps into the role, and the result is something genuinely uncanny. He doesn’t just mimic the moonwalk or nail the shriek before a guitar riff — he captures something harder to define, that mix of childlike wonder and quiet, steely ambition that made Michael who he was. It’s a breakout performance, full stop.
Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson is equally compelling. He brings a menacing nuance to a man who is simultaneously his son’s greatest propellant and deepest wound. There’s a scene early in the film where Joe drills a young Michael through rehearsals with military precision, and Domingo makes sure the audience feels the love and the damage happening in the same moment. It’s the kind of layered acting that elevates a biopic above a Wikipedia page in motion.
The concert sequences are genuinely electric. Fuqua, who knows how to build tension and spectacle in equal measure, turns the Thriller era and the Bad tour into full-body experiences. Watching Jaafar command those stages, you understand, viscerally, why a billion people across the planet fell in love with this man. The music does what the music always did: it bypasses logic and goes straight to the gut.
Where the Michael Jackson Biopic Pulls Its Punches
Here’s where things get thornier. ‘Michael’ is, at its core, a film made with the blessing of the Jackson estate. And that comes with a cost.
The film’s most glaring weakness is what the Rotten Tomatoes consensus nails precisely: it plays like a greatest hits album in search of liner notes. There are beautifully lit scenes, soaring performances, and iconic musical moments strung together, but the connective tissue of who Michael Jackson actually was, what drove his obsessions, what he feared, what he wanted, remains frustratingly out of reach. You leave the theatre feeling like you’ve seen the mythology, not the man.
It’s an irony the film can’t quite escape: it wants to celebrate one of the most complex human beings who ever lived, but it’s too protective of his image to let him be complex on screen.
The Jaafar Jackson Factor: Inspired Casting or Conflict of Interest?
Casting Michael Jackson’s nephew to play Michael Jackson is either a stroke of genius or the clearest sign of the estate’s guiding hand, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Probably both.
The upside is undeniable. Jaafar brings a physicality and a familiarity with the Jackson idiom that no outside actor could have manufactured. The downside is equally real: it’s hard to believe the film would have taken more risks with its subject when the person playing him is family. Biopics that have left the deepest marks — ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Rocketman’, ‘I, Tonya’ — tend to be made by people who had the freedom to portray their subjects unsentimentally. ‘Michael’ doesn’t quite have that freedom.
That said, what Jaafar delivers within those constraints is remarkable. He makes the film worth watching even when the screenplay isn’t giving him much to work with. That’s not a small thing.
Did ‘Michael’ Do Justice to the Real Michael Jackson?
Partial justice, at best. The film honors the performer brilliantly. It captures the scale of his talent, the grueling childhood that forged it, and the joy he could ignite in an audience. For fans who want to relive the magic and feel their love for Michael validated on a cinema screen, this film delivers.
But the real Michael Jackson, the one who was simultaneously the most famous person on earth and possibly one of its loneliest, is harder to find here. The film is more interested in inspiring you than in understanding him. And those are very different things.
What Michael gets right, it gets very right. The performances, the music, the spectacle of it all. What it gets wrong is everything that requires courage: the contradictions, the darkness, the questions that don’t have clean answers. Great art about great artists usually requires the willingness to be uncomfortable. ‘Michael’ flinches.